


A Red Ring Around

by Bananafoam



Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, M/M, Mentions of other characters - Freeform, Mindfuck, Other, Paranatural Weirdness, Recursion, Repetition, Trauma, mentions of THESE characters as well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28273770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bananafoam/pseuds/Bananafoam
Summary: Director Trench was dreaming that he was dead.
Relationships: Casper Darling/Zachariah Trench, Jesse Faden/Emily Pope
Kudos: 15





	A Red Ring Around

Director Trench was dreaming that he was dead. The dream was impact without movement, meaning without knowledge, the endless pupil deep tunnel deep point of stillness in the turning world. In the dream, he held a receiver to the side of his head. In the dream, he held a transmitter to the side of his head. In the dream, he was the memory of a person, the cell residue of a voice stumbling over itself to describe the lines of life intersecting through it, talking and talking and talking.

He was sitting at his desk, he was spread into the corner of his office, he was falling into the damp slab of a grave, and he was lying on his back on a motel bed, he was inside Darling’s body and he was reflected in his wife’s eyes reflected back in his own, in her sight and his, he was crawling through a red desert and he was twelve years old crying his prescription lenses blind and white. 

The cradle of his office phone sat red and ringing by his hand, the receiver in his hand, the transmitter in his hand. The eyes of every man in a suit who looked down from the back shadow of the boardroom were watching the corner of his office. The outline of every life his management team could ever have lived was connected in an unending ring around him, ordered and numbered by clearance, Darling’s smile hovering at the head of the line, where he’d put it. Two prime candidates, distant, dated coded numbered and named, where he’d put them.  
One and then two pairs of hands were over his, behind his, inside his. In the bite of thumbs between his knuckles he felt a map of three ages, bone sliding into bone, the racing loop of fingerprints felt as clear and large and readable as a satellite picture of an intersection. 

Inside the shape of Darling’s head was the face of everyone who had ever walked into his office, slices laboratory thin sliding one over the other. In substance, and then in negative, aligning to show through the collated flesh of fifty-one years of payroll a blueprint of all human life. A dead warning light flattening their skin down to a darkroom wound, black eyes glossed the black of a telephone dial. In the tunnel of pupil layered on pupil there was nothing and no end.

He could see along the thin limits of everything. A line connecting every human eye to every other human eye, a spot of red running down the plastic-wrapped slope of an office chair new and waiting to be removed, a strip of orange peel sliced from the middle too thin to be seen or felt, opening a line down and wider and darker into the wet eye of the fruit. Two parts, parted, a black line pulling wide, pupil deep, pitching everything connecting the two into the endless down of itself. 

The flashing lens that was Salvador and Tommasi and Marshall and Darling smiled in time to words that shivered in the cradle of Trench’s skull. Two pairs of hands and his around and inside and leading them, enclosing the switch operated system of transmission held against his head. He felt the texture of thirty million tons of dynamite flat packed waiting for a truck to send it where it was needed. The shearing heat of a meteorite falling over Allende, black rock veined with black glass, powdered calcium in holes the size of teeth. The still thinking dust of Dr. Theodore Ash Jr, smeared between extraction fan blades. 

Darling’s face moved, and every face Trench knew moved inside it, telling him in meaning without language every dream they had had at the same time. He was inside the sound, in grey magnetic resonance. The tongue, pulling its cell residue behind it. The ridged shell edge of teeth, a ring of men in suits paper chained around a point each holding a gun to the side of their neighbor’s head, each other hand open and expecting. A dead dog, in a box, on a shelf, labelled with a date and code.

Away down the line in the dark Trench saw Northmoor’s hands praising a root of black rock, his mouth cracking with iron-tasting authority. A gun inside a bomb. Two seeds of uranium shot together, branching out and out into a groan of light, into a burning tree with roots that reached down the span of lifetimes. The decay heat blooming from the walls of a generating station, the ooze of iodine into the clouds over Three Mile Island. The rate of mutation swelling the eyes of a newborn in Bhopal. The bulb of cancer eating his father’s head. What branches are these, what roots.

A stroke of paint on the edge of a painted branch, holding a chemical history of the world up to the point of its painting. Flax and lead, eggshell, salt, calcium powdered out of bone. The red office corner shade, in the interlocking dot and dash of carpet pattern, named after the meteor that made its colour. The million choices leading to the colour and the stroke.  
The awareness ringing into his dreams as he slept that the seed of every act cracked into a fractal of itself. A forest of more acts, more choices, propagating in and around and all the time expanding along one another, every second, in thirty million directions at once. That the cell level of his body was expanding, flowing out in heat, in dead particles, that the dot and dash particulate of skin, room, house, city, country, world, and every world and every space around every world and every space around and behind and inside that space was expanding, to nowhere, and no purpose. Out of his hands. The mandatory pain of knowledge, the remedy of meaning. 

The meaning of everything written on everything in letters a cell high. A cell dividing and dividing and dividing itself. A worm, a brain with a mouth eating the matter it moved through, warming black mud, still living if split into two. Two pairs of hands, bone divided out of bone, reaching towards the switch under his finger. His hands, guiding them there. Possessed, meaning belonging to one another. 

A sliver of brain vivisected, red curling out in clouds twitching to a heartbeat, to the movement of a mouth speaking. His grandmother’s tongue fumbling over itself in time to the rabbi, Lev, one four, three seven. A family streaked with blood and oil, scraping the leprous walls of their house. A stain metastasizing through the corridors of an empty house. His house, empty, furniture plastic-wrapped waiting to be sent where it was needed, a child’s chest of drawers vivisected and flat packed, on its way to a landfill.  
A disk storage drive, suspended by an edge, grey on grey behind prescription lens glass. The containment of a memory of disaster, a date and code, numbered and named. Possessed, meaning haunted. 

Papers, signed, in a brown paper folder. The paper pale strip of skin worn by a ring. The interlocking order pattern of carpet covered by branching stains. Fingers interlocking, the pores on Darling’s skin as close as a satellite picture of the moon, a red ring worn by the bridge of his glasses. The interlocking order pattern of holes in the mouthpiece of Trench’s office phone. Possessed, meaning belonging to another.  
The last prime candidate and the girl in research, moving into a future present, their future Trench’s present, their future Darling’s present. Northmoor’s past, Ash’s past. Fingers interlocked, going down choice by choice away from themselves.  
A worm named after a woman. Important message from Dr. Casper Darling. A team of astronauts dead under the shadow of a red desert. A sliver of brain suspended by an edge, diagrammed for study, the word that described his father’s name redacted from the label. A priest enclosing the vaulted understanding of the world into the cause and effect of holding a smoking heart up to an altar. Darling’s understanding vaulting the edge of the world, the space behind spaces reflecting his lenses blind and white. Here’s that document you asked for, don’t show anyone else, semicolon, closed bracket.

There was no fear, in the dream, like that crouched every day in the corner shadow of his office. The fear of possession, hands empty and receiving, of belonging to another. He was inside the body of everything. He was a seal being branded into the grey meat of a wall. A boardroom table, a tombstone, an altar stone. Vivisection of cables wires and tape, the knife of the word Department, dividing and dividing. He was himself reflected in the eyes of everyone who had ever walked into his office, he was crawling through a red desert, he was bleeding on an examination table, he was divided into the lines of a blueprint of all human life.

He was inside the sound of a dial-up connection, the rattle and screech of empty language, the name of the sound the sound itself. The trick mirror of a projector screen, turning back the fourth wall of its user’s eyes on themselves. He was the transmission system on the hip of Director Zachariah Trench, drawn on a celluloid fire bubbling the red-striped white-lined tarmac of a playground in Ordinary, Maine. He was the sight of his own face through the narrow lens of Helen Marshall’s eyes, frozen on the disintegration line of a planned airplane crash, seeing himself, twenty years too soon, decide to become responsible. The tilted static line at the back of his hearing, vibrating between the words responsible and culpable.

He was a worm with the name of a man, opening a hole in the matter of machinery as unreal as the space between suns, overflowing networks, the remote execution of nervous systems made from black glass and calcium. An error decaying out of caution, the point hanging in shadow between knowledge and action, a cell dividing and dividing, system by system, possessing.

He was the substance of his own childhood dream, the roots of teeth trickling up into the bone behind his face, circling his head, cracking through his brain with crown shards of calcium black and splayed like fingers.  
The blind white space of an empty pillow. The white pearl heads of roses dropped one by one into a line on the garden path, rotting yellow and red. The substance of his childhood through prescription lens glass, the tunnel of a removed tumour boring from ear to ear through his father’s head. A receiver, pressed into his mother’s ear, a ring of red under the bone. A receiver, holding a phone to the side of a neighbour’s head, an empty hand open and expecting. An expectation, holding a phone to the side of his head, a hole in his head open and receiving. The catch before impact where the knowledge of impact ran out before movement, the movement of power held in inaction in threads of muscles that might pull the impact back if only action could move as fast as knowledge. What roots that clutch at the stony ground.  
A worm of knowledge, unnameable, boring through his child’s head. Receiving, the office phone stuck to his cheek with shaking sweat. Sickness spreading in the corners of a nervous system, blood and black oil, the depthless shadow inside a pupil pulling wide once and forever, the span of a space between suns. Knowledge, without understanding. The needle sharp whine of a high A, silent in the space between heartbeats, vibrating into silence. Felt in the bone, in the ringing red at the base of his skull.

He was the idea of a ship on the Gulf of Tonkin, the doctored dot and dash on radar as eight thousand miles away workmen broke through the wall of a tunnel boring from ear to ear of New York City and into a hollow that was a tree that was a house.  
He was a ring of men in suits shaking hands over the remains of Mỹ Lai. He was a Pernex contracted engineer watching the first cubic metre of black depthless oil swell out into the Bay of Campeche. He was a private office of energy and service traders diverting electricity from California to two hundred houses in Nevada. He was a fuse on the ISS, a fuse in the coils of a NORAD computer bank, transmitting the blank warning light of the end of everything. A fuse on the pilot system of the Lunar Prospector, possessed, undergoing remote execution. Shrieking connection as hands two hundred and thirty eight thousand miles underneath it drove it into the skin of the moon. 

He was Director Northmoor shaking the hand of Agent Zachariah Trench and feeling the static sparking ecstasy of power held in inaction. He was the black warming mud at the beginning of warm life, stirring with the urge to action. He was the land he crept up towards, the grey resonating always of the House.  
He was a single cell pinned shuddering at the point of a needle, at the point of a nail, at the point of a pyramid. Willing movement, wanting to write the meaning of the House on its walls, as it was written on him. A formula, an order of words, a prayer. A song at the bottom of everything. He was a pair of wet and red hands scraping at the walls of the House, and the House was what it always was, roots going on and down as long as any of it had existed, a spike through the middle rib of the world.

He was each dot of ink in the printed words infection vector, a detonating line of meaning uncased by the coming together of time, place, willing action, energy in nervous systems outflowing their limits. An error decaying out of caution, out of fear and neglect and misery, a choice becoming a choice becoming the end of everything.  
Caught between being and unbeing, stretched celluloid thin, red desert light in bars cutting the outflowing of his body. His hand and the hands of the surviving prime candidates holding a switch operated system of remote execution against his skin. The memory of the idea of a person, Agent Trench, Deputy Chief Trench, Director Trench, an old man with hands shaking on a switch operation system, afraid. A cell, a brain with a mouth, pinned to the point of a bomb. A needle, fingers tapping at the base of his skull, the red rooted edge of teeth tapping together, closing together from ear to ear.

Darling’s mouth snapped, itself moving itself a second after itself, a copy of a copy of a copy, and again, then again. Seventeen years in the soft smiling edge of teeth, spent numbering the individual rays of starlight as they sung down warnings from suns that had died before the first note. Naming them, with a date and a code. A picture of each, ordered by clearance, pinned on the point of a needle, dividing and dividing until they covered the light, until all Trench could see and had ever seen was the pictures. The racing lines of life visible, readable, looping the message that cracked open his mouth in iron-tasting victory, intersecting, dreams they all had at once, cutting on and down across the wet red eye of the world.

He came up, woke, in the mud at the bottom of everything, on the soft slab of his daughter’s grave, on a motel bed, on the spotlit floor of a registry office, on a playground bubbling red-striped white-lined tarmac, in the tight spool of brain shivering fatally in on itself at two in the morning, on the shudder and release of an explosive charge tunnelling though the side of his head, the exit wound open and expecting. On the floor in the corner of his office.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh worm?:  
> https://bit.ly/3hgQhmo  
> https://bit.ly/3hfCzjF
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! ( ^3^)/~♡


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